BioShock 2 Q & A: "It's More Personal This Time"

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The game's co-art director talks about Rapture, Sophia Lamb, and making a game of extremes.

By Michael Thomsen

You wouldn't think that an airline pilot and a game designer have much in common. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to meet Hogarth De La Plante, environment art director and co-art director from 2K Marin, at a special Sony preview event in New York. De La Plante began his career in graphic design and animation, then decided to take to the skies. He spent a few years criss-crossing the country as a pilot with America West before realizing that was "a really terrible career move." De La Plante turned in his pilot wings and started freelancing in the games industry, doing animation and art for games like Mass Effect, The Outfit, and Civilization IV before landing with 2K Boston to work on BioShock. De La Plante has also been one of the key members that made the jump from Boston to the Bay, helping to form 2K Marin to create BioShock 2. I got a chance to pick De La Plante's brain about his work on the upcoming sequel and what he's hoping players will take away from the experience.

IGN: What were the sort of things that you focused on when you decided to make the sequel? What's the game really about? We've heard a lot of talk about art deco and plasmids and player choice in terms of weapons and customization, but how does all of that translate into a theme or a specific meaning? I know Ken (Levine) talked a lot about freedom of choice.

Hogarth De La Plante: I think freedom of choice is built into the Boston studio's way of doing things, and that, I think, is tangential to the thematic qualities of BioShock the IP. So I can talk about those things separately. Like any complicated piece of art that has hundreds of people working on it, you sort of don't know what you're getting until you put all the pieces together and then it's like "Wow, that's cool for this reason." Because you can see it up against this other thing. Originally BioShock was this nerdy sort of PC RPG title. It was supposed to graduate from System Shock 2.

The game design philosophy behind System Shock 2, and I didn't work on it but I know a lot of the guys that did, they put in a whole bunch of systems even if some of them weren't very polished, and players were going to make their own game out of it. Then we're going to have emergent gameplay because players discovered that this weapon works in a certain way and then it becomes fun because they think it's something that they invented. So that was just something that was built into the Boston kind of mentality when they were designing BioShock. Then it graduated into being a console title and we had to focus on certain elements that were working well on the consoles. The thing was sort of like a snowball. At first it was this tiny kind of title that Ken imagined, then it got bigger and bigger. Every time we came out with a demo or 2K came to look at a milestone, it was just sort of gathering momentum. We didn't really realize what it was going to be until it was released.

Thematically though, which is a little more interesting question, it's something Ken always talked about, and something I've had a lot of conversations with Ken about. People get really fixated on the Ayn Rand, capitalism-gone-awry thing. That's sort of how the theme of BioShock manifested itself, but really what it's about is extremism and a condemnation of extremism. If you take what Ayn Rand says and what Andrew Ryan's ideas are and kind of write them down real quick in a summary, it sounds like a good idea.

IGN: Andrew Ryan contradicts what Ayn Rand says. He's not a Randian thinker. His fundamental principles are in complete opposition to one of the four basic tenets of Objectivism, which is that you're not supposed to harm other people.

Hogarth De La Plante: He sort of started in his own way, but in either one of the cases, if you take what they say to its logical extremes, like any idea, it becomes monstrous to, I don't want to say govern, but to kind of run a socio-economic entity. BioShock 2 is the same thing, but it's on the opposite end of the spectrum from Andrew Ryan. He talked a lot about the individual but he saw certain things emerging out of his society in Rapture that he didn't like and tried to put down. So he was a hypocrite in that way, because he was a human being. His whole system of rigid extremes didn't really work that well.

BioShock 2 is about the same thing but on the other end of the spectrum. Sophia Lamb, the villain, is a collectivist. To her human beings are like ants. So it's worth sacrificing a few dozen ants for the good of the colony. When you think of it that way, it's sort of disgusting. But when you think about in terms of her creepy presentation where it's like, "Hey, everyone's going to get along and help each other to make a better society." it sounds okay. But when you realize the extremist nature of it, and how if you were really to try and write it down as a doctrine and try to run a society that way, it's terrible and repressive. And so that's what BioShock 2 is about, thematically.

IGN: How do you go from that - I imagine you in a pitch meeting with a whiteboard talking about what the game's going to be about on a broad level - how do you take all of that and sit down with the Unreal Editor to start building wireframes and geometry?

Hogarth De La Plante: That's a really good question. I don't know how to answer that. I guess it's sort of a top-down thing. The best thing we can hope for as people who are managing a creative team, I manage a team of artists building all the levels, and our creative director Jordan Thomas, he has things that he understands at the very top level about Sophia Lamb and what her motivations are, and how the Big Sisters relate to that, and the fictional history of them as characters, and you as the enigmatic Big Daddy character in BioShock 2. He knows more about that than I do, and so he tells me what I need to know for the environments and I disseminate that to the people who are working on it. They get more focused on all the details of assembling levels and putting in lighting to make it more beautiful and all that stuff. I don't want to say that stuff gets distilled, but it's kind of a cross-game between the thematic interest of the management level and then the details of the execution of the product on the production end of the spectrum. It's hard to really say this is how we do it, but that's just sort of how the information runs down.